I went to the London blogger’s meet up this week where guest blogger – Rob from wineconversation.com provided some delish wines for us all to sample (I sampled heavily, ahem) and some wine related tidbits to pleasure our intellectual palettes….

Anyway, many of the people I talked to in the room and indeed many friends and colleagues who are “into” wine often remind me of the same types who (rewind 10-15 years) used to be obsessed with buying records. So without going all Carrie Bradshaw on you, it got me to thinking 😉 is wine the new vinyl?

Here are 5 things they have in common:

§ A passionate bunch of followers who often verge on geeky

§ A sense of competition for rare and hard to find vintages/releases

§ A habit of gobbling up all your disposable income

§ Something to talk in great detail about to everyone who comes round your house

§ Instead of “you’ve got to hear this mate” it is now “you’ve got to try this mate”

So anyway, the main point I took from Rob’s talk was that most wine is bought nowadays in supermarkets and many great wines just don’t ever make it onto the shelves.

So, given the similarities listed above between the wine and the record collector….your new age wine buff would surely relish the opportunity to spend hours in his local wine shop or deli perusing the rare specimens his pals won’t have? And surely, merely buying the odd bottle of plonk in Tesco is about as satisfying as grabbing a Coldplay album on the way to the checkout?

So why aren’t there more indy wine shops around? And why don’t more indy delis and restaurants capitalise on this market? Seems like a missed opportunity on both sides to me…

Anyway, a good night was had by all and it was great to meet several other bloggers/tweeple in the flesh (Jaz Cummins, Gary Andrews, Andy Roberts and his lovely pal Linda) and catch up with Wadds and Chris Reed for drunken debauchery.  I will be making more of an effort to go along to these next year. Huge thanks to Andy Bargery for putting it all together.